Sierra Leone Emigration and Immigration

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Online Sources

• 1787: Sierra Leone Resettlement Scheme, 1787 at Findmypast — index ($) Search the passenger lists of settlers – including many Black Loyalists– setting out from England for the British colony of Sierra Leone in 1787.
• Book of Negroes Some of the Loyalists listed in this document eventually immigrated to Sierra Leone.
• 1878-1960 UK and Ireland, Incoming Passenger Lists, 1878-1960 at Ancestry - index & images ($)
• 1890-1960 Passenger Lists Leaving UK 1890-1960 at Findmypast - index & images ($)
• 1946-1971 Free Access: Africa, Asia and Europe, Passenger Lists of Displaced Persons, 1946-1971 Ancestry, free. Index and images. Passenger lists of immigrants leaving Germany and other European ports and airports between 1946-1971. The majority of the immigrants listed in this collection are displaced persons - Holocaust survivors, former concentration camp inmates and Nazi forced laborers, as well as refugees from Central and Eastern European countries and some non-European countries.
• United States Immigration Online Genealogy Records

Sierra Leone Emigration and Immigration

"Emigration" means moving out of a country. "Immigration" means moving into a country.
Emigration and immigration sources list the names of people leaving (emigrating) or arriving (immigrating) in the country. These sources may be passenger lists, permissions to emigrate, or records of passports issued. The information in these records may include the emigrants’ names, ages, occupations, destinations, and places of origin or birthplaces. Sometimes they also show family groups.

Immigration to Sierra Leone

• By 1495, the Portuguese had built a fortified trading post on the coast. The Dutch and French also set up trade here, and each nation used Sierra Leone as a trading point for slaves brought by African traders from interior areas undergoing wars and conflicts over territory. In 1562, the English initiated the Triangle Trade when admiral Sir John Hawkins of the Royal Navy transported 300 enslaved Africans – acquired "by the sword and partly by other means" – to the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo on Hispaniola in the Caribbean Sea area of the West Indies islands, where he sold them.
• In the late 18th century, many African-Americans claimed the protection of the British Crown. There were thousands of these Black Loyalists, people of African descent who joined the British military forces during the American Revolutionary War. Many of these Loyalists had been slaves who escaped to join the British, lured by promises of freedom (emancipation). The official documentation known as the Book of Negroes lists thousands of freed slaves whom the British evacuated from the nascent United States and resettled in colonies elsewhere in British North America (north to Canada, or south to the West Indies).
• Pro-slavery advocates accused the Black Poor of being responsible for a large proportion of crime in 18th century London. Many in London thought that moving them to Sierra Leone would lift them out of poverty.

Sierra Leone Resettlement Scheme

• The Sierra Leone Resettlement Scheme was proposed and drew interest from humanitarians who saw it as a means of showing the pro-slavery lobby that black people could contribute towards the running of the new colony of Sierra Leone.
• In 1787, the British Crown founded a settlement in Sierra Leone in what was called the "Province of Freedom". About 400 blacks and 60 whites established Granville Town. Most of the first group of colonists died, owing to disease and warfare with the indigenous African peoples. When the ships left them in September, their numbers had been reduced “to 276 persons, namely 212 black men, 30 black women, 5 white men and 29 white women.”
• The settlers that remained forcibly captured land from a local African chieftain, but he retaliated, attacking the settlement, which was reduced to a mere 64 settlers comprising 39 black men, 19 black women, and six white women. Black settlers were captured by unscrupulous traders and sold as slaves, and the remaining colonists were forced to arm themselves for their own protection. The 64 remaining colonists established a second Granville Town.

Nova Scotian Settlers

• Following the American Revolution, more than 3,000 Black Loyalists had also been settled in Nova Scotia, where they were finally granted land. They founded Birchtown, Nova Scotia, but faced harsh winters and racial discrimination. Together with British abolitionist John Clarkson, the Sierra Leone Company was established to relocate Black Loyalists who wanted to take their chances in West Africa. In 1792, nearly 1200 persons from Nova Scotia crossed the Atlantic to build the second (and only permanent) Colony of Sierra Leone and the settlement of Freetown. In Sierra Leone they were called the Nova Scotian Settlers, the Nova Scotians, or the Settlers.
• The initial process of society-building in Freetown, however, was a harsh struggle. The Crown did not supply enough basic supplies and provisions, and the Settlers were continually threatened by illegal slave trading and the risk of re-enslavement.

Jamaican Maroons

• The Sierra Leone Company refused to allow the settlers to take freehold of the land. In 1799, some of the settlers revolted. The Crown subdued the revolt by bringing in forces of more than 500 Jamaican Maroons, whom they transported from Cudjoe's Town (Trelawny Town) via Nova Scotia in 1800. The Maroons helped the colonial forces to put down the revolt, and in the process the Jamaican Maroons in Sierra Leone secured the best houses and farms.
• At about the same time (following the abolition of the slave trade in 1807), British crews delivered thousands of formerly enslaved Africans to Freetown, after liberating them from illegal slave ships. These Liberated Africans or recaptives were sold for $20 a head as apprentices to the white settlers, Nova Scotian Settlers, and the Jamaican Maroons.
• Many recaptives were so unhappy that they risked the possibility of being sold back into slavery by leaving Sierra Leone and going back to their original villages. They built a flourishing trade in flowers and beads on the West African coast.
• Disparities in the entries of the recaptives, specifically in the names; many recaptives decided to change their given names to more anglicised versions which contributed to the difficulty in tracking them after they arrived in Sierra Leone.

Emigration From Sierra Leone

• Between 1991 and 2001, about 50,000 people were killed in Sierra Leone's civil war. Hundreds of thousands of people were forced from their homes and many became refugees in Guinea and Liberia.
• According to the World Refugee Survey 2008, published by the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, Sierra Leone had a population of 8,700 refugees and asylum seekers at the end of 2007. Nearly 20,000 Liberian refugees voluntarily returned to Liberia over the course of 2007. Of the refugees remaining in Sierra Leone, nearly all were Liberian.

For Further Reading

• Sierra Leone After a Hundred Years, e-book
• The Black loyalists: the search for a promised land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783-1870

There are additional sources listed in the FamilySearch Catalog:

• Sierra Leone - Colonization